Everyone does get to weigh in on whether they liked it or not. Whether or not they can articulate why they think whatever they think.
Them couching their personal likes / dislikes in absolute terms is either just lazy imprecise speaking, or is them genuinely overstepping what’s reasonable. The more one is an expert on the topic, the closer one can get to making grand “objective” pronouncements.
Dunning-Kruger (and simple stupidity, not ignorance) being what it is, often the least knowledgeable and most stupid people are also the most absolute in claiming their opinion is objective truth. They’re also the most resistant to being shown that distinction.
I hear ya. Some years back, I criticized Garry Trudeau for some lazy writing, and I did it here on the Dope. I felt that he cobbled together characters who had sterling qualities he lacked who nonetheless held views identical to his own, and I called bullshit on it. A bunch of people replied that since I’m not a syndicated cartoonist myself, my views were inevitably sour grapes. If I’d had my wits about me at the time, I would have pointed out that they were attacking me, not my views, and that anyone who reads Doonesbury has the right to disagree with it from time to time (even though it remains my favorite comic strip in general).
Dunning-Kruger notwithstanding, the author of anything put into the public square has the burden of making his point and making it well, and sometimes he whiffs.
I often wonder if that scene should be attributed to the director, rather than the writer. I mean, are we sure that the script actually said “They both begin typing on the same keyboard,” rather than the director saying, “Okay, both of you use the same keyboard. That will make it look really exciting.”?
It varies from show to show, I’m sure, but directors often have broad latitude to fiddle with scripts as they’re filming.
I think most artists have to figure out the balance between doing their unique thing and appealing to a broader audience. But ultimately we kind of have to live with it. If you want more people to like your stuff, figure out what makes them like stuff. If you want to die on principle you can do that too. But nobody’s obligated to like your stuff. Or in the immortal words of Steven Pressfield, “Nobody wants to read your shit.” (From his book, Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit.)
My head canon for that has always been that as a naturally telepathic race, they never developed anything we’d consider computer security. Because what point is there is something like a password if everyone already knows it, or in something subtle like hacking a computer when everyone knows you are trying to do so?
This is related to the apocryphal story about acting. From Day for Night (1973), here’s one version:
Séverine:The actor had always dreamed of playing Hamlet. At last, he staged it and played the role! But he was so bad, he was booed every night. One night he was fed up, he stopped in the middle of “To be or not to be”, turning to the audience, he said: “I didn’t write this shit.”